The Royal Welsh

I've never been to the Royal Welsh before.
It's quite an admission, after over twenty years in Wales.
Today, though, I went for the very first time.
I've been to other events at the showground, of course, like Wonderwool every year, so as long as I could see the permanent buildings I more or less knew where I was - though I still got us lost at one point.
First we had to get to the showground, though, and the only option was park and ride from outside Builth, with a fleet of coaches running, and a chap walking up and down the queue reminding us all that our cars were in carpark South 1. I don't know how many other car parks there are around the show ground.
We were there most of the day, and we didn't even see the main show ring.
We did, however, see the Sheeptacular, which was fun - twenty rams of different breeds, all of them magnificent, more or less trained to climb steps on a big podium where they could be admired. "This one's a trainee - and he probably weighs more than I do," said the compere, a shepherd called Mr Powell, as he hauled one of the rams into place with the help of his brother, who later sheared another, smaller sheep.
And Fly the sheepdog sat in his kennel all the way through, accepting the adoration of small children.
After seeing one sheep sheared, we found our way to the competitive sheep shearing - and it was a revelation! There were shearers from all over the world - with their own groupies in the audience, which was huge! We saw a couple of chaps from Croatia, some Americans, Spanish, a Japanese man, an Austrian woman - and there were TV cameras there, and shearers giving interviews afterwards. There were Germans, too, and we sat near a Swiss couple who had come over specially. They each had six sheep to shear, not taking the fleece off in one complete piece, like Mr Powell had done, but just doing it for speed (with the poor sheep looking up the shearers' backsides at times, as they held the sheep between their legs). There were girls with long pieces of wood clearing the loose fleece from the stage into big hoppers as they worked.
It wasn't all sheep oriented - there was also rather wonderful icecream from Sub Zero, which had won lots of prizes and a big cup - very creamy, and the proud father of the owner of the business said that they used to be called Mr Creamy until Kerrygold took the name for themselves and they had to re-register. They're from the Rhondda Valley.
There were also some not so wonderful sausages from Parson's Nose, though the pasty from Oggie's was very nice.
We saw the Fur and Feather area, too, though today it was all feather, with pigeons and ducks and chickens and geese of all sorts and varieties.
It was all great fun - but what we were really there for was collecting signatures for a petition, and to find out about that, you should visit the Fairtrade Hay blog on the sidebar.